Do You Have a Hostile Attribution Bias?

The level of popularity you experienced in childhood and adolescence is still affecting you today in ways that you may not even realize. Learn about how psychologists study popularity and how these same concepts can be used in adulthood to be more successful at work, become better parents, and have a happier life.

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Dr. Mitch Prinstein

John Van Seters Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Author of Popular: Finding Happiness and Success in a World That Cares Too Much About the Wrong Kinds of Relationships

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[MUSIC] Hi. We last left off by talking about the idea that we all have social information processing biases, and that comes from the experiences we had in childhood and adolescence with popularity. Our peers from back when we were kids are still affecting how we see things, how we interpret things, what we want, and the behaviors that we engage in to this day. What we're going to talk about now are a couple of very common biases that we've seen in the research literature, that really tell us a lot about why some kids with peer rejection experiences grow up to have difficulties across many domains in their lives. And the first of these is referred to a hostile attribution bias. Specifically this is referring to the cue interpretation phase. But what we found is that people with a hostile attribution bias that actually affects all the different areas of social information processing. And here is how we study it with young kids. Kids might look at a little picture like this, and they're read a story. This one says, imagine you're sitting at a lunch table at school, eating lunch. You look up and you see another child coming over to your table with a carton of milk. You turn around to eat your lunch, and the next thing that happens is that the child spills milk all over your back. The milk gets your shirt all wet. Why did the child get milk all over your back? And that story is read and then kids are just asked, tell us why you think that happened? And then, that information can be coded. Most people will say that it was an accident, the milk probably spilled and that's how the milk all got on the back and it's okay. But there are some kinds that would say, no, that was done on purpose. That was done because that kid was being mean and because they were trying to get milk all over me. Here's another scenario. Imagine you brought your new toy to school today. You saved up money to buy the toy, and you want to show it to the other kids at school. You let another child play with it for a few moments while you go get a drink of water. When you get back you see that the child has broken your brand new toy. Again, a lot of people would say, why would the child have broken that toy on purpose? It was just an accident. Somehow it just happened. But some kids, kids that we would say have a hostile attribution bias would look at that experience and say that happened because that kid broke the toy on purpose just to be mean to me. It turns out that kids with a hostile attribution bias during childhood and adolescence and also when they grow up, they tend to have a biased or distorted way of experiencing all of the social information processing steps. So if you ask kids to look at a picture or to watch a video, and you ask them to tell you what they saw, hostile attribution biased kids will selectively see the things in their visual field that suggest aggression. Even if you control for how aggressive these kids were previously, we find that kids who were rejected by peers develop an increased tendency to have this hostile attribution bias. And they see more aggressive things in front of them. And they fail to see positive things in front of them, kids that are maybe laughing and playing with each other. As we just talked about, cue interpretation is also affected. So when presented with an ambiguous situation, why did someone walk by and their shoulder bumped your shoulder? They would say they did it on purpose, it was to be mean, and everyone else would probably not think that. When you give them an interpretation and you say imagine a situation in which someone was mean to you. What would you do? So in other words we're holding constant the cue interpretation. These kids with a hostile attribution bias, they're more likely to come up with very aggressive scenarios. So their goals would be I want to get back at them, I want to make them feel bad, I want to hurt them. If you think about it, even as adults, there are ways in which people who are wrong, whether in the workplace or whether in a romantic partnership, their desire is specifically to try and get back at them. That's something that we're seeing stemming from hostile attribution bias. Even when you say to some people we want to hold constant your goal clarification. Let's say that you're trying to find a way to resolve a conflict. People with a hostile attribution bias would say, well the way that I would do that is, and they would list a whole bunch of aggressive responses. I would yell them. I would scream at them. I would psychically hit them. People with the hostile attribution bias tend to think about those type of things, select those type of things. And even if you give someone the answer, if you say let's think of a way that you could settle an argument in the most calm, healthy way, something that would help you enhance your relationship with this person, now we're going to do a role play. So that would test the response enactment phase. But you've given them the response selection. People, children, adolescents, and adults with a hostile attribution bias have a harder time with that role play. And they tend to end up doing things that are a little bit aggressive anyway. Maybe this rings true. Maybe you know know somebody out there that has a hostile attribution bias. Maybe it's you. The way that we see this in adulthood, of course we don't see people kind of beating each other up as much. That's something you see a little bit more in children and adolescents. But you do see people that tend to act aggressively. We do see that there is physical violence and also emotional abuse that occurs towards a spouse or a romantic partner. We do see towards kids that people with a hostile attribution bias tend to also be aggressive towards other children emotionally or physically. We also this in ways that are a little bit more subtle. So for instance, in the workplace we see that people with a hostile attribution bias grow up to assume that they're being kind of blown off by their coworkers. When someone might innocently forget to credit a coworker with an accomplishment, they see that as being a specific attack, as something that happened on purpose. They were left out. It was due to some way in which they were being used or someone was trying to put them down and thwart their ability to be promoted in the work environment. So this is how hostile attribution biased types of people see their workplace. As a result, these are folks that don't tend to do as well at work. They come late. They leave early. Research shows that they're more likely to steal office supplies. They bad-mouth the workplace to other people, and they're even more likely to quit. We even now have some research to show that there may be intergenerational effects. So, if these same adults that have a hostile attribution bias grow up to become parents, then what we find is, it changes the way that they are parents, and it changes their kids. Nicole Werner did a research study where she looked at moms who had hostile attribution biases. And she measured how much moms had a hostile attribution bias when asked to interpret what happened between moms and other adults, what happened between moms and kids, especially their kids, and also, when they were given scenarios, and asked to interpret what was happening between two children. And they got all that information from moms, and then they found out how the kids were doing by asking these kids' teachers to complete an assessment of how aggressive their kids were. Well, what they found was that moms who had hostile attribution biases, they tended to think that kids were more likely to be hostile towards their children. So, in other words, when they were asked to interpret a scenario in which their kids were interacting with other kids, and something that most people would think was a neutral exchange was occurring, these moms thought that what was really happening was that other kids were teasing their son or daughter. And, they tended to respond in a way that made them feel like they needed to protect their children, or they needed to fight back for their children. Also, interestingly, these moms tended to say that when they got into fights with their own children, they thought it wasn't because of their child expressing their needs, or their child being just tired or hungry, or some other reason why their child was being upset. They were more likely to think their children where being hostile towards them, towards the parent, on purpose. And, of course, you can imagine that that changes a lot about how that kid would then be raised, or how that mom feels about being a mom. Also, what happened is that moms with a hostile attribution bias they tended to be kids that their kids tended to grow up to be more aggressive. The teachers independently reported that those same kids, the ones of the mom's who had a hostile attribution bias, were the ones that fought more with their classmates, got angry among their class, and tended to be more physical and more upsettable when it came to scenarios that most kids tended to not have as many problems with. So that's just one example of a type of bias that we see happen in childhood and adolescence that tends to have an effect on the way that we experience things all throughout the rest of our lives across different contexts.